Game Night and Thoughts on Malifaux

My gaming group decided to move Thursday Game Night to every other Friday.  This past Friday was our launch, as was my reattempt to play Malifaux, after a 2- or 3-year hiatus.

I already expressed my complaints with Wyrd miniatures, i.e. fiddly and fragile multi-part models, but I have to say, their appearance on the tabletop is inspiring.  They have a presence and dynamism, even when the poses are relatively static, that brings you into the cinema and flavor of the game.

Here is my Steamborg letting off some steam in the heat of battle (ha, ha), to conceal his fellow fighters.

Ramos (lower-right) is about 80% painted, and the rest of the crew is obviously only primed.  However, priming with the airbrush in both black and gray is a nice way to at least get started.  Playing with black-and-white versions of the models at least provides contrast and 3-dimensionality to identify the models and reflect their action and character on the tabletop.

As for gameplay, my complaint about Malifaux and Warmachine/Hordes is that the amount of special rules for each model (probably averaging around 10 per model) presents an overwhelming, up-front learning curve.  It's hard to learn how to operate each model, much less learn all the combinations and synergies between the models in your faction/crew.  And that's just one faction.  Now try learning your opponents' factions, and if you're a league or tournament player, learning all of the factions.  Compared to Freebooter's Fate, where you might have only a couple of special abilities per model, Malifaux is a brain-burner to learn.

Another setback for me when I first started Malifaux was the fact that I bought 3 factions, with the expectation that one of them would be a competitive faction.  I learned from 40K that you can't count on the factions to be balanced, so I figured I would preempt that frustration.  Unfortunately, I selected my factions according to my usual criteria, what models I liked, instead of researching which factions were reported to be stronger or weaker.  Turns out, all three of my factions were regarded as relatively underpowered (Bayou Gremlins, Marcus, and Zoraida).  Between the difficulty of learning the factions and the frustration of being pummeled by opponents who devoted more time to researching the combos for their well-powered factions, I allowed Malifaux to fade to the background.

Eventually, I was to try again, and that is what led me to buy the Ramos starter set, which I read was respectable in its relative ability and relatively simpler in its depth of special abilities.  Even that opportunity fell to the wayside, but that is why I had the models on-hand, when several members in my current game-group expressed interest in giving Malifaux a try.  Attempting it again with fellow newbies was appealing enough to give it another go.

All to say, I enjoyed our game on Friday night!  I lost, of course, but the game was close, and the balance and tension of the opposing forces held my interest and gave me the mental challenge that I enjoy.  Each side had enough muscle to dish out the pain, and each side had interesting tricks and tactics to throw curve-balls into situation.  I have more to learn about combining and sequencing the special abilities in my faction, but it feels like a manageable learning curve that will be fun to learn, rather than a daunting obstacle.

Malifaux - Ramos

I hosted a paint evening with 3 buds -- hanging around a table, painting models, shooting the breeze, and listening to music.  A nice evening.  This is how far I got on Ramos in a couple of hours.  I'm torn on whether to add color to his pants or not.  I definitely want to do something with his bag, if nothing more than color it brown, but I'm tempted to add a pattern, even try a subdued carpet-bag look.  I hesitate, though, because I don't want other elements of the model to compete with the central focus of the face and the flame.  Tough choices.

Dipping my toe into airbrushing

A rainy, Sunday afternoon -- a good time to fiddle about with airbrushing and figure out how I'm going to set up, organize, and learn this new skill.  I struggled for a few weeks deciding where to set this up.  Ideally, I wanted a permanent station, but that's just not in the cards quite yet.  I need to either give away or sell my unused keyboard to make room for a dedicated station, or I need to feel confident enough with controlling the airbrush that I can set it up in the office/studio with the rest of the hobby stuff.  Neither of these options are viable soon enough, so I'm setting up a semi-permanent station in the basement, like so.....

I try out two different airbrushes on a relatively safe exercise -- priming.  I want to learn how the different airbrushes behave -- their spray patterns, the effects of varying the air pressure, how they clean, etc.  I want to learn what supporting equipment and supplies I need (or don't need!) to make the process efficient and enjoyable.

I learn that I actually have decent control of the overspray, even when using a sub-optimal airbrush.  I learn that two of my airbrushes are sub-optimal!  Obviously, there's newbie error involved, but it's all relative.  More on that later.

Priming with an airbrush is amazingly convenient and cost-effective.  Sure, there's a significant up-front investment in equipment, but when you can coat multiple models with just a few drops of primer, the equipment will pay for itself very quickly.  Plus, I am no longer a slave to the weather.  No more risk of trashing miniatures with spray-primer that turns gritty from the humidity.  Plus, I have tremendous control over the placement and thickness of the primer on the model.

I try some zenithal highlighting with gray primer over the black base.  These models are going to practically paint themselves!

Here's what I've learned about my airbrushes.  I wish I had this kind of insight when I was shopping for airbrushes, so hopefully this is useful to someone out there in blog land (if so, you can thank me by being a Follower on the blog!).

The airbrushes below are shown, from top to bottom, Fail to Win.

First up, a single-action, siphon-feed Badger 200 NH, purchased at Michael's.  I purchased this airbrush to learn on.  Single action is simpler, and it's probably easier to clean and maintain.  I planned to use this on coarse work, like terrain, just to learn the basics of airbrushing and learn how to clean and maintain it.  It did serve this purpose, and, indeed, terrain is probably all this brush is good for.  I did use it to apply the camo pattern on that Devilfish model, but it was a struggle.  I didn't have the fine control I needed.  I'll continue to use this for terrain, but the control is inadequate to even do simple priming.  I'm sure I could improve the control by twiddling with the air pressure and the limiter, which I attempted to do with the Devilfish, but it's just not worth it when there are better tools, even for a beginner.

This situation is analogous to learning an instrument, say guitar.  If you want to learn guitar, don't buy a cheap guitar to "test the waters" to see if it's something you'll stick with.  Buy a quality instrument.  A poor instrument is hard to learn (hard to fret the strings; hard to keep in tune; etc.), and you just set yourself up for frustration, and you give up.  A quality instrument feels good to play -- even if you suck.  A quality instrument draws you back to play again -- until you don't suck.  Same with airbrushes, I think.

The second airbrush is a dual-action, gravity-feed Thayer & Chandler Omni 4000.  This is the airbrush I requested for Christmas after doing a lot of on-line research.  Unfortunately, I didn't realize that this brand is, for all practical purposes, out of production.  Badger bought it, I think, but it was a real chore trying to find a hose or adapter, just to connect the thing.  When I finally purchased parts to enable using the airbrush, I used it as my learning instrument.  My learning exercise was to spray terrain, and I probably made two mistakes.  One was blowing house latex paint through the airbrush.  That's probably OK for the Badger 200 NH, but probably not for the Omni, which has a finer needle.  Secondly, I cleaned it using a cleaning kit.  I learned from a YouTube video that you shouldn't use the brush cleaning kits, because they'll damage the finely calibrated fit of the needle and other components.  That YouTube video was an hour-and-a-half presentation series by the second-generation owner of Badger.  Sorry, I don't remember his name -- I came across the video by way of Wargamers Consortium.  Anyway, this airbrush has presented a bit of a headache, and it didn't seem to offer any better control than the Badger, possibly because it may have microscopic scratches in the needle housing, due to cleaning it with the cleaning kit.

That brings us to the dual-action, gravity-feed Harder & Steenbeck Ultra 8483.  This was the control I was looking for!  This is how I imagined airbrushing would feel.  Now the downside with this airbrush was that I purchased it with a starter kit of Vallejo Air Color paint.  Handy dandy.  But I had no idea that the connector is a quick-release coupler.  None of my screw-on connectors on my hoses worked, of course, and I had no idea what was supposed to work with it.  It was only because the Grex salesperson showed me the quick-release connectors at the NOVA Open that I learned to recognize what this thing is.  Luckily, I purchased quick-release adapters from the Grex guy, so I was able to try them out with this airbrush, and they worked.  This brush was a pleasure to use and easier to clean than the other ones.

Next up will be my Grex trigger-action brushes.  I wanted to get a clue to what I was doing before I risked using my hard-won NOVA Open prizes.  I look forward to trying them out, and I have even higher expectations of their performance over the Ultra. 

Battle Report - Warhammer 40K

I almost forgot to post the game I played Saturday night!  There's not much to post actually -- only 5 pictures.  I might as well just show them all here, instead of linking to the Picasa album like I normally do.

My friend, Campbell, and I are continuing to evolve and test our lists.  These games are more instructional than competitive.  Campbell added new models to his Necron force, including the battle-barge thing and the scythe fighter aircraft thing.

4 out of 5 of the photos show deployment.  Everything looks so wonderful at the start of the battle.  Hopes are high.  The armies look dashing.  No wonder I take so many photos of deployment.  Then everything goes to hell, of course.

Here's a view from the Necron side.

Closeups of the battlelines, in neat order.  I'll paint that terrain one of these days!

My new Devilfish making its appearance.  I haven't touched it since Christmas.  It will be on hold until I get more figures assembled in preparation for Demo Day.

No doubt, all you Tau players immediately saw my horrible deployment error -- placing the Broadsides on the line.  I should have had them in the backfield, where they would be entirely out of range of enemy weapons.  Stupid mistake.  Pretty much cost me the game.  Here's the setup for my eventual annihilation.  The Broadsides are nowhere to be seen.....   Live and learn!

Malifaux Modeling (continued)

 I am currently extremely sour on Malifaux -- the Ramos faction just surpassed the Bayou Gremlins as my low point in assembling miniatures.  Grrr. 

Too many frikkin' tiny pieces...

Kit-bashing a base for the Steamborg Executioner.  

I glued that punk's 4 legs an average of 2 or 3 times apiece, before getting it to work.  The thing only balances when you finally manage to glue on the third leg, if you're lucky.  Once establishing the desired poses with superglue, I attempted to reglue them with my old reliable, 2-part epoxy.  Didn't work for this mini.  The weight on the leg forces the join to separate, even after waiting a full 5 minutes for the epoxy to dry.  I ended up using the trick of using a dab of paper towel in combination with super-glue.  That requires follow-up work to remove the excess fibers.  I resorted to burning some of them off with a lighter!

Here's the assembled crew. 

I recommend novice modellers avoid this crew.  It is an absolute bear.  And it's so fragile, I'm paranoid to use it in the game.  This is one of those occasional times when I really appreciate Games Workshop.  They balance their designs among aesthetic, ease-of-production, ease-of-assembly, and durability for tabletop gaming.

Malifaux modeling

Yes, Hobby ADD strikes again.  A buddy of mine expressed interest in trying out Malifaux.  That motivated me to pull out the Ramos starter box that I shelved three years ago, when Malifaux fell to the backburner.  I actually have the Gremlins and Marcus crews fully painted and ready to play (and half of Zoraida).  But one reason I was disenchanted with Malifaux is the volume and complexity of the special rules for each model, along with all of the brain-burning combos and synergies.  The Gremlins were not only one of the worst crews guilty of that down side, but they're relatively underpowered on top of that.  Marcus and Zoraida aren't much better.  That's why I picked up Ramos -- to attempt the game again with a simpler crew.  But then the whole game faded to the background....

Filing mould lines off of these Ramos models reminded me of another reason that I'm disenchanted with Malifaux.  The minis are so damn tiny and fiddly.  You can see two legs are already broken for the tiny arachnids.  Malifaux models are very poor models for gaming, because they're so delicate.  Ridiculous, really.  I know, gripe, gripe.  Sorry, I"m fresh off this task.  And I haven't even attempted gluing these little bastards together yet!

My buddy, Steve, and I plan to play a learning game next week.  Steve is already frustrated, trying to understand the rules.  He's reading the 1.5 big book.  I have the mini-book, which I think is better presented, but still, I know what he's going through.  I still have a few pages on the Wyrd forum from 3 years ago, trying to figure out how the Pigcharge works....

Anyway, I think we're going to have one or two chances for this game, before Steve decides whether to invest.  Still, it's a motivator to put together the Ramos crew and see if the game feels smoother using a simpler faction.

More Alkemy Aurloks

These are such beautiful miniatures.  So hard to work with, though!  The resin is very hard, which is great for holding such fine detail, but it's a chore to scrape and sand the mould lines, especially on such tiny and fragile figures.  Plus, the slender pieces require hot-water treatment to straighten them.

Anyway, I still need to fill gaps and magnetize the bases before I finally prime them.  I love how these guys look, though.  The poses have such life to them, and there's a good mix of dynamic and heroic poses.  Can't wait to paint these guys and put them in action.